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For close to a decade, the Gulf Coast of the United States has been in almost constant disaster recovery mode, and a number of lessons have been learned concerning disaster recovery and behavioral health. The purpose of this report was to describe the natural development of a Gulf Coast Resilience Coalition (GCRC).

Methods

The GCRC methods began with state-specific recovery goals following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and transitioned to a shared multistate and multidiscipline coalition. The coalition’s effectiveness is demonstrated through continuation, procurement of funding to provide response services, and increased membership to ensure sustainability.

Results

The coalition has enhanced response, recovery, and resilience by providing strategic plans for dissemination of knowledge; post-disaster surveillance and services; effective relationships and communication with local, state, and regional partners; disaster response informed by past experience; a network of professionals and community residents; and the ability to improve access to and efficiency of future behavioral health coordination through an organized response.

Conclusions

The GCRC can not only improve readiness and response, but work toward a shared vision of improved overall mental and behavioral health and thus resilience, with beneficial implications for the Gulf South and other communities as well. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2015;9:657–665)

The Greeks, as they invariably did, had a word for it, or in this case, for ‘them’. The word was barbaros, and it meant a person who did not speak Greek and, by extension, was not open to the benefits of Greek culture and civilization. The Romans, who took so many things from the Greeks, also took the word with analogous application to the non-Latin speakers and the unenlightened mob. It was their invaders from the North, the Huns and the Goths, who became the very incarnation of Barbarians, writ large, for the havoc they wrought in the very epicentre of the civilized world. The negative cultural implications of the word thereafter took precedence over the linguistic. In the post-medieval world, countries vied to call each other names, among which ‘barbarian’ was particularly prominent. The French became especially generous in applying the word to everyone and anyone who did not subscribe to the glories of French civilization and, by inference, to the majesty of the French language. They were never slow to brand the English ‘barbarians’, attributing the defect to the Roman legacy or Germanic ancestry of the English, and finding, for instance, a splendid condemnation of ‘barbares Anglois’ whose ‘cruels couteaux / Coupent la tête aux rois, et la queue aux chevaux’. By the eighteenth century, however, Britain, France, Germany, Holland, and Italy, whatever they had called each other in the past and continued to do sotto voce, were at least united in viewing the countries further north or, by an increasingly common re-alignment of the map, to the east as lands of darkness populated by barbarians and awaiting the sun of the Enlightenment.

Although believing strongly that the experience and expertise gained by young Russian officers serving with the British navy was ultimately of greater value than the presence of British officers serving in the Russian navy, Count Semen Vorontsov (the Russian ambassador in London during the last years of Catherine's reign) was more than ready to acknowledge the considerable contribution made by British officers. His statement that ‘notre service, depuis le chevalier Knowles et surtout par les soins de l'amiral Greigh, etait sur le pied anglais’, made in the wake of the Russian naval victories in 1788–91 over Swede and Turk, recognised, moreover, the crucial organisational and inspirational role that Knowles and Greig in particular had fulfilled. In less than 100 years a Russian navy had been created out of nothing and at virtually every stage in its evolution and in almost every aspect of its activities a British contribution was apparent.

One hundred years (plus a few months) separated the death of Admiral Samuel Greig in October 1788 from the discovery by the young Peter I in June 1688 of a dilapidated little boat on the Romanov estate of Izmailovo. This was the boat that was to be immortalised as ‘the grandfather of the Russian fleet’. Moreover, it was, according to the introduction that Peter himself wrote for the Naval Regulation (Morskoi ustav) of 1720, ‘an English boat’, possessing the wondrous advantages of sailing against the wind. Whether the boat was indeed English – and legend subsequently embroidered the account to suggest that it had been a gift from Elizabeth I to Ivan IV – or of English design cannot be established, but Peter's informant was Franz Timmermann, a Dutchman.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the Grand Tour was well and truly established as a highly recommended, if not an altogether indispensable, part of a young gentleman's education. The classic itinerary took the tourist across the Channel to Paris and south to Italy – and Rome, ‘the famousest place in the world and the first motive that induced me to become a traveller’. The classic actors in the rite were the scion of a noble house, freshly emerged from public school or, indeed, in fewer cases, from university, and his tutor, more likely than not an Oxbridge don, a man of assumed maturity and probity, a Mentor to an English Telemachus. The pupil was supposedly keen to add a smattering of modern languages, primarily of French, to his school Latin, to refine his taste and broaden his knowledge, and to return to become an enlightened landowner, parliamentarian or leader. The travelling tutor, or bearleader, as he was commonly called, was to instruct and guide and to guard his pupil from the perils and snares of the world. Not unexpectedly, the reality frequently fell far short of the ideal. Many a callow youth preferred to tilt the eighteenth-century balance between utility and pleasure decidedly in favour of the latter, when it was interpreted as gambling, gallivanting and whoring, while the poor tutor as often found that the world he confronted was very different from the world of books he was accustomed to inhabit. Parents, moralists and critics were not slow to count the costs and enumerate the disadvantages that the tour was seen to bring.

Of the three ships – the Bona Speranza, Bona Confidentia and Edward Bonaventure – which set out from England in 1553 to seek a northern sea route to the East, only the last succeeded; the first two singularly failed to live up to their names. Edward VI had supplied the captains with a letter to be presented to rulers of the lands they were to encounter; it alluded to the function of merchants ‘to carry such good and profitable things, as are found in their countries, to remote regions and kingdomes and againe to bring from the same, such things at they find there commodious for their owne countries’. Although Edward was dead by the time a reply was received, it came from a totally unexpected quarter. Ivan IV, to whom Richard Chancellor, captain of the Edward Bonaventure, had delivered the letter, replied promising ‘free marte with all free liberties’. For the sober John Milton, writing over a century later, ‘the excessive love of Gain and Traffick [which] had animated the design’ detracted from what otherwise might have seemed ‘an enterprise almost heroick’.

The company which was formed to exploit that trade and which received its royal charter in 1555 was the Company of Merchant Adventurers, better known as the Muscovy Company. It operated as a joint-stock company, enjoying a monopoly of trade with Russia and acting as a body; the British merchants in Russia were not independent traders, but servants or employees of the Company, headed by its factors or agents (hence the name Factory).

Johnson Newman, who has not been previously named in these pages, was a devoted servant of Russia during a career spanning some fifty years, beginning in 1755 in the reign of Elizabeth and ending early in the reign of Alexander I. Initially an ‘informator in the English language’ at the Naval Cadet Corps, he moved to the College of Foreign Affairs as a translator, but in the 1770s he was to be found at the Russian embassy in London. He subsequently served in Lisbon, before returning to England in 1785 to take up the newly created post of Russian consul at Hull. He is an interesting figure not least because of his largely unsung efforts to be useful ‘tant à la Russie qu'à ma Patrie’ by the translation of literary and historical works. His own command of languages, specifically English, French and Russian, led him to recognise that ignorance of foreign languages formed a huge barrier between nations and that British ignorance of Russian was a particularly depressing example. He wrote in 1789:

The western half of the newly renamed English Embankment today looks distinctly shabby, but a number of buildings still impress by their elegant proportions. No. 56 is an excellent example of the work of the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi, whose restrained Palladianism is evident in a whole series of buildings in different parts of central St Petersburg. The building, or rather the rebuilding of the original structure, was begun in 1814, three years before Quarenghi's death. Although it underwent some reconstruction in the 1870s, it retains its characteristic features: a row of half columns and corner pilasters of the Corinthian order at first-floor level, supporting a pediment, topped by three statues. It now houses the St Petersburg City Excursion Bureau and the lofty central hall is used as open-plan office space. Long curtains cover most of the walls, and it is only when these are drawn back to reveal brass commemorative plaques, an organ and religious inscriptions that the building's original function becomes clear. This was the English Church, the focal point of the British community's life in pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg. A British visitor describes the impression it made on him in 1827, a few years after it was opened:

On the Sunday immediately after our arrival, I attended service in the English church, a very handsome and substantial edifice, situated about the centre of the English Quay, where it presents a noble front to the river, being decorated by a colonnade, placed on a massive and well-distributed basement story, in which are the apartments of the Rev. E. Law, nephew of the late Lord Ellenborough, and Chaplain to the Factory. […]

The observation that doctors in Russia were ‘scarce and generally Scotch’ appeared in a book of travels published by one John Richard in London in 1778. The fact that the book was apparently the production of an armchair traveller whose knowledge of Russia would seem to have been limited to the superficial perusal of other people's accounts and conversations with visiting Russians increases rather than minimises the interest of the remark. If Richard were reflecting British opinion about the state and composition of the Russian medical services, then that opinion reveals its usual compound of half-truth and fiction. Doctors, virtually all foreigners before the reign of Catherine II, were indeed scarce in Russia; the majority of them were German, however, and only a small minority British, of whom the most prominent and visible were indeed Scots. But it was not so in pre-Petrine Russia.

Within four years of Richard Chancellor's unsought visit to Moscow in 1553 there arrived the first English physician to practise at the Russian court. What precisely prompted Richard Standish to accompany the returning Russian ambassador, Osip Nepeia, is unknown, although several other Englishmen, including an apothecary Richard Elmes, were also attracted by the inducements offered. Certainly, they were royally treated by Ivan IV and it is recorded that ‘there were given unto master Standish doctor in Phisick, and the rest of our men of our occupations, certaine furred gownes of branched velvet and gold, and some of red damaske, of which master Doctors gowne was furred with Sables’. Standish had little time to enjoy his good fortune or to incur imperial wrath, for he died in 1559, less than two years after his arrival in Russia.

This has been a difficult book to write and an even more difficult one to finish. It is with some embarrassment that I recall it was as long ago as 1973 that I published an article entitled ‘The British in Catherine's Russia: a preliminary survey’ with every expectation of finishing a book within two years, rather than two decades. The survey was basically sound, although the use of the word ‘preliminary’ was well-advised. What I was then surveying was indeed the tip of an iceberg and with every year that passed, the imposing size of that iceberg slowly revealed itself. More and more fascinating individuals were discovered, more and more archives, family and public, were found, more and more areas of British activity were recognised. I have frequently sought refuge from the colossus by writing other books, other articles, some, but not all, connected with Anglo-Russian relations, and including a book whose title, ‘By the Banks of the Thames’, echoes that of the present volume but which was considerably easier to write, not least because the materials were more circumscribed, the number of individuals involved infinitely smaller.

My fascination with the general theme of Anglo-Russian relations in the eighteenth century dates back to my postgraduate study of the career of Nikolai Karamzin, the Russian man-of-letters who visited, and wrote about, England just after the French Revolution; but if I were to single out two works which influenced the direction and range of my research specifically into the activities of the British in eighteenth-century Russia at an earlier stage, I would name Matthew Anderson's Britain's Discovery of Russia, 1553–1815 (London, 1958) and James Cracraft's article, ‘James Brogden in Russia, 1787–1788’ (1969).

This 1996 book offers a fascinating investigation into the lives and careers of the British in eighteenth-century Russia and, more specifically, into the development of a vibrant British community in St Petersburg during the city's first century of existence as the new capital of an ever-expanding Russian empire. Based on an extremely wide range of primary sources from Britain and Russia, the book concentrates on the activities of the British within various fields such as commerce, the navy, the medical profession, science and technology, and the arts and ends with a broad survey of travellers and of travel literature, much of which is nowadays completely unknown. Also included are many attractive and unusual illustrations which help to demonstrate the variety and character of Russia's British community.

The list of foreign architects, engravers, painters and sculptors who made a direct contribution to the development and flowering of the arts in eighteenth-century Russia is a long one. Italians, French and Germans, in perhaps that order of priority, figure prominently down the decades from Peter's reign to Catherine's: Trezzini, Schlüter, Leblond, Rastrelli, Vallin de la Motte, Quarenghi were outstanding architects, each leaving their distinctive mark on the new capital; Rastrelli the Elder, Caravaque, Rotari, Grooth, Tocqué, Falconet and Mme Vigée Lebrun were among the most noted of a generally less imposing list of painters and sculptors. Only the name of architect Charles Cameron, who never worked in the capital itself but at Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk, would normally be included so as to acknowledge, as it were, a British presence. British scholars, indeed, would find it difficult to produce other British names, even for a catalogue of the ‘also-known-to have-worked in Russia’ variety, although Tamara Talbot Rice made a valiant attempt in one of her articles to deprive the talented Danish painter Benjamin Pattersen of his birthright by calling him ‘the first in a line of British topographical artists to visit Russia’. Nevertheless, while conceding that Cameron remains in a class of his own, it is possible to extend the British list to more than modest length, particularly if we include, as we should, exponents of landscape gardening, one of the most esteemed arts of the eighteenth century. At least a dozen gardeners, eight painters, three architects, two engravers, a sculptor and a medallist worked in Russia at various times, but predominantly and expectedly, during Catherine's reign.

In the report of the embassy, sent by the first of the Romanovs (Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich) to England in 1613–14, it is said that the ambassadors told Sir John Merrick, the experienced merchant-diplomat, that ‘you know how in the past under our Great Sovereigns the Tsars of Russia many willing people from other states and from England, doctors and smiths and many learned necessary artisans, knowing about the Moscow state, that it is abundant in everything and hearing of the Tsar's grace, came by themselves and were in honour and sufficiency and earned a great deal’. They continued, in accordance with their instructions, that the tsar ‘wants also to see in his country necessary foreigners, and wants to show his Tsar's grace to them more than before’. The Time of Troubles had severely disrupted commercial, cultural and diplomatic ties between Russia and the West in general and Britain in particular. During the second half of the sixteenth century Russia had seen the arrival from Britain of merchants and diplomats, physicians and soldiers, and a few specialists in other areas. In 1567, for instance, Queen Elizabeth had sent as a result of a request from Ivan IV a goldsmith by the name of Thomas Green and a building and fortifications expert, Humphrey Locke. Ironically, it was silversmiths – a group of whom Boris Godunov had sent back to England in 1602 because he had, he said, a superfluity of them – that Tsar Mikhail specifically requested.

The views upon the banks of the Neva exhibit the most grand and lively scenes I ever beheld. The river is in many places as broad as the Thames at London: it is also deep, rapid, and as transparent as chrystal; and its banks are lined on each side with a continued range of handsome buildings. On the north side the fortress, the Academy of Sciences, and the Academy of Arts, are the most striking objects; on the opposite side are the Imperial palace, the Admiralty, the mansions of many Russian nobles, and the English line, so called because the whole row is principally occupied by the English merchants. In the front of these buildings, on the south side, is the Quay, which stretches for three miles, except where it is interrupted by the Admiralty; and the Neva, during the whole of that space, has been lately embanked by a wall, parapet, and pavement of hewn granite; a magnificent and durable monument of imperial munificence.

Such were the impressions of the Rev. William Coxe on his first visit to St Petersburg in 1779. A visitor to the city some 200 years later would immediately recognise the scene and locate the buildings described; but if he was unfamiliar with the city's history, he would undoubtedly be puzzled by the reference to the ‘English line’. However, for a century and a half up to the October Revolution, the English Line or Embankment was almost as famous as the Nevskii Prospekt and seemingly a permanent reminder of the link between the British and Peter's city.

Of the five centuries during which the British and Russians have been in more or less constant contact, the eighteenth century is the most interesting, the most attractive and the most varied in the forms that contact assumed, or so it appears to my undoubtedly prejudiced eye. The sixteenth century had the excitement of ‘first-footing’, the fascination of a rapprochement between a Russia ruled by Ivan the Terrible and an England under Elizabeth, and came to a close with a masque of the Muscovites in a Shakespearean comedy; the seventeenth century had its periods of warming relations under the enlightened Boris Godunov and of considerable cooling under Aleksei Mikhailovich; the nineteenth century, on the other hand, throws us deep into ‘Great Power’ struggles and love-hate relationships, Russophilia and Russophobia, Anglomania but never quite Anglophobia, the first really bloody conflict between the two nations notwithstanding; and the twentieth century, tsarist and soviet, offers infinite variety in cultural, ideological and political counterpoint and confrontation, with the pendulum swinging violently from Russian Fever to Red Menace, from ally to foe. The eighteenth century had something of all these features and much that was distinctly its own.

In Peter I and Catherine II, it had pre-eminently two rulers on the Russian side whose personalities and activities made them the stuff of legend and whose generally positive attitudes towards Britain and the British brought to relations between the two countries the colour and drama which were conspicuously missing on the British side in the first Georges.